Try either Union or Craftsman but with a fiberglass (not wood) handle. Both are very well-made and offer lifetime warranties.

There are as many different answers and solutions to this question are there are people to address it.

One way is to look for better tools. Look through the offerings provided by a company like A.M. Leonard for a full range of tools, from some that are no better than you get at Wal-Mart, to some that can cost over $100 a piece...for a shovel.

Personally, I really like the Ace of Spades from A.M. Leonard, and a steel handled spade, made by Fiskars (black with orange, that's fiskars, right?), of all things, generally available through the big box stores. People who use my tools remark about the weight, but are generally won over by the way you can use them...and anyone who hand digs nursery stock gets the value of a top quality digging spade.

Another way is to incentivize your workers to take care of the tools. I used to work at a place that gave each crew a tool budget for the year, for things like shovels, rakes, pruners, the hand tools, not the power tools. And any money left at the end of the season was split among the crew. Another place gave a bbq/pizza party for each month that no hand tool was broken or lost.

One place gave you a set of hand tools at the start of the year, but they only gave you one set. Pruner, utility knife, shovel. If you lost or broke it, you paid for the replacement, refundable at the end of the year if you turned it in. Almost everyone lost the first set, almost no one lost the second one. Management had some pretty serious discussions about just going straight to the withholding policy, but at the end, they figured it was only fair to let people learn the lesson themselves.

Every place I've worked or talked to about tool stuff has had some way of dealing with the issue, some more creative, some more generous.